Twitter notifier lets us know how awesome we are

Let’s admit it, you’re just a little bit vain. Heck, we’re all just a little bit vain when you really think about it. Instructables user [pdxnat] was self-absorbed enough that he constructed an LED “mood light” that alerts him each time someone mentions his user name on Twitter.

The build is pretty simple, with most of the work being done on his PC. His Arduino is wired to a simple RGB LED that calmly cycles through various colors until someone mentions his name on Twitter. At that point, the client software running on his PC passes a message to the Arduino over a serial interface, causing it to wildly pulse the LED. Once it catches his eye, he stops the alert cycle with the press of the reset button, returning the LED to its previous state. As a bonus, he decided to write the Twitter-polling application in both Processing and Python, enabling fans of either language to easily replicate his work.

It’s a pretty cool idea, and it would be great to see someone expand it to include other online services to provide a greater overall feel for how awesome they really are.

@’Google Weary’ Fortunately google doesn’t make that info available to the general public, but you could do a periodic search for yourself on google and parse the ‘About xxx results (0.06 seconds)’ text to see how often you are mentioned, but the period would have to be large enough to not have google block your ass though.

The mood light is a simple example showing how to use Twitter to control an Arduino. You could search for any text, hashtags, mentions, direct messages, or any attribute known to the Twitter api. I limited it to @mentions for proof-of-concept. Robotics or techno-home projects would be a cool direction to take this: tweet #openCatDoor or #turnOnLights or #blastStereo-eleven.

The idea isn’t new, I admit, but I wanted to provide a Processing / Python example specifically for the Arduino crowd.